Operation German: literate and conversational by March 2012 | Page 2 | My language mission and my log | Forum

csidler, it is a very good point about how important vocabulary can be in learning. I struggled a great deal with German until I realised the importance of vocabulary. I then began using Anki intensively. I use it daily for a minimum of twenty minutes and have about six decks of German installed. Two of them are really big ones, six thousand and two thousand, while the remainder are smaller decks with a much smaller number of cards.

I noticed when reading news articles and German Wikipedia that vocabulary knowledge really gives you a lot more of a flow and after a few months of rehearsal I noticed that I can get the gist of sentence or paragraph, even if a few words escape me at first. This in comparison to simply giving up when encountering an article before. I can highly recommend using Anki to build a decent vocabulary.

Your book recommendation looks intriguing, but I wonder if it is not the same vocabulary covered in a couple of decks of Anki? Regardless, the book appears almost impossible to come by.

I just explained about Benny and his missions and mentality in German :P

The vocabulary isn't that impressive, but I just wanted to share that with you.

Enigmagico said:

Ich habe gerade dich addiert ins Facebook. Hast Du Skype? Falls so, mein ist enigmagico.

Du bist im Facebook genehmigt. :P

Ich addiere dich auf Skype wenn ich es anschalte, heute Abend.

ThGaius Julius said:

Lingo said:

"Basics" sounds like you've another language in mind?

 

Thanks for the tips.

I do have another language in mind. I was contemplating between Russian and French. Eventually I settled for French, for two reasons:

1. I think it's more beautiful than Russian.

2. My girlfriend speaks French, and is really pissed at me for studying German and not French. If I pick Russian and not French she will kill me ><

 

Russian has a very strong point in favor – it's a very common language in Israel. I run into it every day, and if I would speak Russian it would look great on my Resume, and will enable me to communicate with many more people that have a hard time with Hebrew (and a few groups of Israeli Russians that insist on talking Russian between themselves).

Eventually, French won.

Russian will have its turn!

There are plenty of French speakers here too, particularly in certain areas! Have you found many German speakers locally, however? I've come across plenty of people with Yekke (recent) ancestry, like me, but few current/regular speakers.

So, I tried tackling an episode of Türkisch für Anfänger with no subtitles like I said I would.

Success? Mediocre + , I guess. I understood everything that was happening and with shorter sentences I mostly managed to pick up meanings from context, if I didn't know all the words. I will definitely continue doing this.

So I can't write "mission accomplished" with sparkling lights and ribbons and all yet, but we're heading in the right direction.

Gaius Julius said:

status (this is also plural, right?)

Personally I'd use 'statuses', if I had to. About Facebook I'd probably actually say 'status updates' and avoid the issue. Part of my brain would be wanting to use some Latin pluralisation for it, but seeing as my husband knows Latin and I don't, I wouldn't be wanting to get that wrong.

Well done on the German. I'm trying to decide how best to work on mine (after deciding I was just going to focus on reading it, rather than speaking, it now looks like we *might* be going to Germany for a wedding next year, which changes things).

Computer is broken. Once more it is obvious how enslaved I am to that machine…

I e-mailed all my pen pals that I'll be gone since I don't have time to write from work, I don't have any books to read, my computer-spiel is obviously not available… All I have had for the last week was the Anki deck on my phone.

I'm on my Father's laptop now so I can get some studying done :P

The computer game is going really great. I skip trying to understand the technical terms, and I usually manage to get the point. Outside of cut-scenes you can also re-hear sentences so it's really simple to get the pronunciation right. I get a lot of new words per day out of it.

So, not much new to tell…..

Gaius Julius said
 

CAN'T

- Watch television properly…. Not-properly I do kind of manage.

- A few Grammar issues that I can't seem to shake off.

 

Hey Gaius, 

I'm curious what these, "Grammar Issues" are. Perhaps I can help you out with these.  

You're in luck! These things are actually pretty easy to understand. I also struggled with these things, until I realized what the logical pattern was. Of course, this would be a lot easier for me to explain if we were skyping. Sometimes things make more sense when you see it happen visually with notecards.

Anyways, here we go:

1.) In German, the verb is always in second position. You've probably heard this a lot. That's great, because we can put the prepositional phrases in front of the verb and then send all the other junk (nouns, other verbs, adjectives, etc) to the back. Or when we use a modal verb (möchten, können, würden, etc.) we put them in the second position, and all other verbs go to the back. 

Because of German's 4 Cases (Nom., Acc., Dat., & Gen.) and Indefinite/Definite Articles, it doesn't matter where in a sentence, you put the Subject, Direct or Indirect Object. 

In Technical terms: The function of (In)Definite Articles and Cases: is to show you what Gender, Case, and Number (Singular or Plural) a noun in the sentence is.

German doesn't have 4 cases for no reason. In German, you can move nouns wherever you want.

For example:

Der Hund bießt den Mann.

"The Dog bites the Man."

In English, we can only say, "the dog bites the man", in that way to make it make sense. 

In German, we can say, "Der Hund bießt den Mann" or "Den Mann bießt der Hunde". They both mean the same thing.

Why in German, can we say it forwards and backwards? Because of the Definite Articles.

We know that "Mann" is a masculine word, and when "den" is in front of "Mann" we know it's the Direct object of the sentence (Accusative Case). Same thing with "Hund". When "der" is in front of "Hund", we know that "Hund" is the subject of the sentence (Nominative Case).

Now we can move "Mann" to the front and "hund" to the back, or vice verse. Do you see how that works?  

It may seem very complicated, but really it's very logical and precise (like everything else German). 

REMEMBER THIS! You will never see a noun (in German) without: a Definite Article, an Indefinite Article, or an adjective in front of it." There will always be one of those 3 things in front of a German noun. Why? I'll explain later.

2.) Adjective Endings may seem complicated as well, but they are very similar to the function of (In)Definite Articles. 

*Something to keep in mind, if your goal is to become conversational in German, don't worry about these. This is only one little piece of the German language puzzle, but mastering them will improve your confidence tremendously. 

Adjective Endings have a similar, yet slightly more complicated function than Definite Articles. It will help if you look at a table of these adjective endings, while reading my explanation.

What if I told you, the function for adjective endings, was the exact same as Definite Articles? Well, guess what? It is! As you probably know, there are 3 types of Adjective Endings: Strong, Weak and Mixed. Depending on the type, the adjective ending has a particular purpose.

We already know, from before (1) that the function of (In)Definite Articles is to show us: what position a noun plays in a sentence. 

I'm going to break down and explain each type of Adjective Ending individually:

"Der Words" Weak Endings: When there is a Definite Article in front of a noun (der gelbe Fisch), the adjective ending doesn't play a big role. It's only there to tell you if the noun is in it's Nominative/Accusative Form (what I call "Dictionary Form"). Look at the table, at the nouns, that aren't in the Nominative/Accusative Case. Their endings are "en". Except for Masculine & Plural, when nouns are in the Nom and Acc Case the adjectives end with "e". 

"No Article" Strong Endings: This is when the adjective endings starts to have play a big role! Remember back when I said what the purpose of the Definite Article was? "Show what the position a noun plays in a sentence". And remember when I said, "You will never see a German word without: a Definite Article, an Indefinite Article, or an adjective in front of it."? Now I'm going to tell you why. BECAUSE GERMAN IS SO DAMN PRECISE! In German, there always has to be something telling you what the function of a noun is! You will never see a noun by itself.

Look at the table for Strong Endings. Do you notice any similarities between the endings of the Adjectives in the Strong Table, with the way the "Definite Articles" are spelled in the Weak Endings table? Find the patterns by looking at this table.

Did you notice that when there is no definite article, the adjective endings take over the role of the definite article? Woah! Did that blow your mind? Or are you still lost? It's okay, if you're still lost. It took me about 6 hours of staring at my computer screen before I got it. 

"Ein words" Mixed Endings: These are a little trickier than the other two types of Adj Endings. Simply, because ein words are more ambiguous. For example: "ein" could be used for both masculine and neuter words, in the nominative case. 

I could write a long explanation about how to figure out what ending goes on which nouns with Mixed Endings, but I won't. If the noun isn't the subject of the sentence, the ending will most likely be "en". 

Summary about Adjective Endings: When you need to know what ending goes on an Adjective. Ask yourself, "Is there a "der" or an "ein" in front of the adjective?" If YES, then the ending will be "e" or "en" (depending on whether it is in Nom or Acc case". If the answer was NO, then your adjective needs to show what Gender, Case, and Number the noun is. 

Whew… I hope that helped. If you didn't understand a particular part, let me know. I'll elaborate more :P